Postmodern Existential Sociology

Third version of a long-standing textbook that examines the self in everyday life. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Existentialist Criminology captures an emerging interest in the value of existentialist thought and concepts for criminological work on crime, deviance, crime control, and criminal justice. This emerging interest chimes with recent social and cultural developments - as well as shifts in their theoretical consideration - that are oriented around contingency and unpredictability. But whilst these conditions have largely been described and analysed through the lens of complexity theory, post-structuralist theory and postmodernism, there exploration by critical criminologists in existentialist terms offers a richer and more productive approach to the social and cultural dimensions of crime, deviance, crime control and, more broadly, of regulation and governance. Covering a range of topics that lend themselves quite naturally to existentialist analysis - crime and deviance as becoming and will, the existential openness of symbolic exchange, the internal conversations that take place within criminal justice practices, and the contingent and finite character of resistance - the contributions to this volume set out to explore a largely untapped reservoir of critical potential.

Michel Tournier defines the supreme mission of a writer to be the creation of a mythology which allows for interaction with his readers, who seem to be losing their critical faculties in our contemporary, postmodern world dominated by consumption and dizzying technological advances. Our contemporary society has changed due to the end of the modern era with its reigning ideologies. Collapsing after the atrocities of the Second World War, Modernity and the artistic and literary reactions referred to as modernism, have likewise been transformed. Myth continues to represent the collectivity of human existence, yet, in the short stories and novels of Michel Tournier, myth represents the collapse of the all-encompassing ideologies inherent to the Modern era. The grand narratives of Modernity such as Christianity and Man’s reason have been deconstructed in the postmodern era. The mythology of Michel Tournier expresses these trends towards the dissolution of Modernity and creates individual, mini narratives which emphasize the particularity of individual existence. Tournier takes established mythical models rooted in Christianity, fables and legends of Western Civilization and re-contextualizes them. Through a semiotic reworking of core binary pairs of a myth, Tournier creates a third-order level of representation which modifies the mythical model. The works of le Roi des Aulnes, Gilles et Jeanne, and Vendredi are illustrious of this third-order level of signification. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structural make-up of myth transforms established meanings according to the dominant cultural code. Barthes’ semiological study of myth reveals the levels of representation through which myth creates meaning. Myth builds upon the denotative first-order level of language and through a connotative process, creates a second-order level. This connotative process does not end on this second-order, for in the writings of Tournier, this semiological process is continued to a third-order which re-contextualizes the myth again. Tournier adapts myth to the unique traits of the postmodern era including deconstruction and playfulness by allowing the reader to provide the context of the story. As such we, the reader, take the place as author of our own individual mythology.

Everyday life is something we tend to take for granted, something that just is, something unnoticed. But everyday life is perhaps the most important dimension of society – it's where we live most parts of our lives with each other. This book provides a clear, contemporary and comprehensive overview of the sociologies of everyday life. Looking at everyday activities and experiences, from language and emotions to popular culture and leisure, Encountering the Everyday explores what social structures, orders and processes mean to us on a daily basis. The book carefully leads the reader through historical developments in the field, beginning at the earlier Chicago school and finishing with up-to-date ideas of postmodernism and interactionism. Each chapter relates theoretical ideas directly to case studies and real empirical research to make complex concepts and core issues accessible, relevant and engaging. Written by leading international scholars in the field, this truly global book will inspire and inform all students and scholars of everyday life sociology.

Simon Susen examines the impact of the 'postmodern turn' on the contemporary social sciences. On the basis of an innovative five-dimensional approach, this study provides a systematic, comprehensive, and critical account of the legacy of the 'postmodern turn', notably in terms of its continuing relevance in the twenty-first century.

A festschrift honoring the work of Edward A. Tiryakian, consisting of a large number of essays.

This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Transdisciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual’s imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it. With attention to the question of whether humans are ultimately alone in their self-knowledge or whether what they know of themselves is constructed in common with others, it enables the reader to recognize core questions that frame the methods and orientation of an existential inquiry. In addition to historical exposition, it offers a variety of chapters from around the world that explore the diverse global spaces for, and different types of, existential focus and discussion, thus questioning the view that the existential "problem" may be singularly a matter for the post-enlightenment West. The fullest and most comprehensive survey to date of what human beings can and should make of themselves, The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and research methods.

The MPs’ expenses scandal in England and Wales and the international banking crisis have both brought into focus a concern about ‘elite’ individuals and their treatment by criminal justice systems. This interest intersects with a well-established concern within criminology for the transgressions of such offenders. However, up until now there has been little sustained consideration of what happens to such offenders following conviction and little discussion of how they attempt to avoid reoffending in the wake of their punishment. This study rectifies this omission by drawing upon white-collar offenders’ own accounts of their punishment and their attempts to make new lives in the aftermath of it. Detailing the impact of imprisonment on white-collar offenders, their release from prison and efforts to be successful again, this book outlines the particular strategies white-collar offenders used to cope with the difficulties they encountered and also analyses the ways they tried to work out ‘who they were’ in the post-release worlds they found themselves in. Representing the first sustained qualitative study of white-collar offenders and desistance from crime, this book will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of white-collar crime, desistance from crime and prison. The insights it offers into a particular group of offenders’ experience of criminal justice would also make it useful for criminal justice practitioners and anyone who wishes to understand the challenges faced by a group of offenders who are assumed to have many advantages when it comes to desisting from crime.